Field Codes Archives - Legal Office Guru

The four dates you can embed in your Word documents

One of the most fun discoveries that new Microsoft Word users make is the self updating date. If you’ve already uncovered this, you know exactly what I’m talking about: you click a couple of times, and suddenly you’ve got today’s date embedded in your document, and it will update itself every time you open the document. But what if what you want isn’t necessarily today’s date? What if you need the document to reflect the date it was last saved, or printed, or created? The good news is, you can get any of those with a couple more mouse clicks and a little know-how.

Reader Question: How to automatically number your discovery requests … in 5 keystrokes

If your law firm does litigation work, you’ve probably prepared lots of discovery. And you may have wondered if there’s any way you can avoid typing the phrase “Interrogatory No. X” in Microsoft Word over and over again and get that X to be an automatically incrementing number. If so, the answer is, yes, you can!

Click through for a complete tutorial on how to use field codes in Microsoft Word to automatically number interrogatories, requests for production, requests for admission, or other legal discovery.

Want that “15th day of August, 2012” to self-update? Here’s how

If your documents ever need a phrase like “the 15th day of August, 2012” and you don’t want to wait until the last minute to correct it in your document, here’s how you can embed a date that includes a self-updating ordinal date (that “15th” part) and a self-updating month and year. Click through for the demonstration.

Reader Question: Incrementing numbers in headers

A reader wrote me recently with an interesting dilemma: She needed to be able to automatically increment numbers in a Microsoft Word footer. But she’d found that the otherwise trusty AutoNum field doesn’t work in headers or footers. So how was she going to put the correct “Exhibit [X]” at the bottom of her documents? Here’s the solution I came up with for her. Click the “Read More” link to see the demonstration video.

How to put a different footer on the last page of a document

It’s easy to have a different footer for the first page – just use the Page Setup function called “different first page.” But what if you need a different footer for the LAST page? Well, it may not be check-box easy, but it is possible. Here’s a video tutorial showing you exactly how.

Automatic numbering makes exhibit dividers easy

Here’s an easy way to create exhibit separator pages in Microsoft Word without typing “Exhibit 1,” “Exhibit 2,” ad nauseum, using Field codes.